Welcome to Funafuti, Tuvalu, a pacific paradise. This mod adds lots of detail to Funafuti airport. Bunches of static and moving ships, including a landable cruise ship roam the seas nearby. Beware of them on approach to runway 21 if you decide to arrive in bad weather! Over time I developed this add on from just the airport to covering the whole country in detail so go and have a flight to explore. POI markers will lead the way if necessary.

This is my first scenery creation for MSFS. Month of fighting and learning the SDK caused me a good amount of grey hair. Since I had to invest enormous amounts of time, 3 wifes and 8 of my 9 kids left me. As a fair compensation I asked flightsim.to for a buy-me-a-house or buy-me-a-new-car button but they left me with that stupid coffee. So at least make it big. I like it black, no sugar. Let it be served by a sweet young waitress so I can at least do something about the wife issue.

Funafuti is a fun airport and you can take it literally. If you think it has a taxiway, you are wrong. This is a regular road that crosses the airport and aprons. So Asobos AI-cars driving there are quite realistic. The airport shares a large part of the narrow island with a small town. Both are well integrated into each other and it was sometimes hard to decide wether a default building was part of the one or the other. There are no fences and no barriers so the simple traffic rule seems to be: the one arriving from above has the right of way. This airport is more of a playground, a park or a football field. There are only 3 flights a week by Fiji Link in their ATR 72-600, so the rest of the week the airport is to the people. Watch the video down below for a new idea on how to use an airport!

Although the runway is 1,650 m long and can accomodate A320-class aircraft, the two tiny aprons are much happier with a single ATR or the likes. Two aircraft at a time? Bad idea! If you arrive in an A320, you might like to use the soccer field for business parking. I added a proper grandstand so you can find it.

Don't miss the hot ladies and guys on the beach when approaching runway 21. Fly slow and low. But don't use drone mode to spy on them. That's inappropriate. Give them some privacy!

Enjoy Funafuti!!!

Tuvalu Expansion

Since this is my first international airport and the favourite of my own sceneries, I could not resist expanding this mod further. Now it covers the whole country of Tuvalu. Interestingly two new airfields popped up on Google Maps, that were under construction in 2023. I found no information on them whatsoever but of course I had to include them in my scenery. They are shown in the state of construction. You find them on the islands of Vaitupu and the most northern island Nanumea. The latter was once an army airfield during WWII, that the Americans used during their island hopping campaign. B-24-bombers, Wildcats and other Navy planes took off from here. It was decomissioned after the war and quickly grown over by forest. Now it seems it was revived. Good idea after all. If you felt, that Funafuti with its international airport is one of the remotest places on earth, these islands are even more remote with hours or days of travel by ship only to reach Funafuti, from where you can fly to Fiji and from there into the rest of the world.

I added detail to all of the seven islands or atolls of Tuvalu. You will find churches, solar panels, boats and a few people. The space in between is roamed by plenty of sailing and fishing boats. I will add a lot more detail in future. Some atolls have poor satellite imagery so I did some repair and planted lots of trees where they were missing.

Grab your favourite amphibious plane and go exploring the country of Tuvalu. It stretches about 600 km from north to south, so you'll be busy for a while. Follow the POI-markers, that give you the names of all islands.

Installation

There are two files available for download:

Main Version

Optional Fun on the Runway Version: An optional add-on that adds lots of people, animals and fun stuff on Funafuti runway. This is how it is used most of the time. Install parallel with the main version.

The main scenery consists of three files. Please drop all of them into your community folder. Add the dependencies below.

Full list of dependencies:

All World Updates.

For the rest see the list below!

The Turtle Tank library is needed for the 'Fun on the Runway'-version only.